This study purports to investigate how Korean elementary school students use the strategies presented in Oxford(1990) for speakers of other languages learning English. The study also examines the differences in the employment of strategies between gra...
This study purports to investigate how Korean elementary school students use the strategies presented in Oxford(1990) for speakers of other languages learning English. The study also examines the differences in the employment of strategies between grades, sexes and proficiency levels.
The results of the study are as the followings.
First, comparing the degree of how much the strategies are used by grades shows that memory strategy, complementary strategy, and social strategy are more highly used by 5th graders, while meta-cognitive strategy and affective strategy are more highly used by 3rd graders. Among the strategies, however, only the complementary strategy shows a significant difference between the two grades. The result implies that lower graders as well as higher graders use a variety of strategies, and thus it would be effective to guide students to use the strategy from the 3rd grade when English is first introduced as a regular subject.
Secondly, across all the strategies including memory strategy, cognitive strategy, complementary strategy, meta-cognitive strategy, affective strategy, and social strategy, female students turn out to use the strategy more than male students. Meta-cognitive strategy is the most frequently used in both sex groups, with more frequent use of social strategy by females but more frequent use of memory strategy by males.
Thirdly, as for the degree of using the strategy by proficiency levels, the strong group of English uses all 6 strategies more often than the weak group. The advanced students use the strategies in the order of meta-cognitive strategy, social strategy, and cognitive strategy. Despite the tendency of leading students to use mostly memory strategy, especially under the EFL conditions as in Korea, the required training of students should focus on meta-cognitive strategy, social strategy, cognitive strategy, etc.
Finally, the study compares the strategies used by the strong groups in both 3rd and 5th grades. The result shows that the 3rd graders use the strategies in the frequency order of meta-cognitive strategy, cognitive strategy, social strategy, memory strategy, affective strategy, and complementary strategy. As for the 5th graders, meta-cognitive strategy, complementary strategy, social strategy, memory strategy, cognitive strategy, and affective strategy are used in the frequency order. Thus, it is necessary to take the differences in the use of the strategies into consideration when it comes to the training higher or lower graders.
Based on the findings outlined above, this study proposes the followings:
First, the future studies need to develop diverse teaching and learning models which consider learning strategies devised for the students of different grades and proficiency levels. There are a lot of cases that the students have become to lose interests in studying English as they become upper elementary, or even to give up studying, leading to failure in studying English. Since teaching method designed considering the students’ proficiency levels by grades can pave the way for successful English study, the development of models in consideration of study strategies is an urgent issue.
Secondly, along with the development of models, it is required to develop materials which suit for different proficiency levels and grades. Except the meta-cognitive strategy which has the highest degree of use for all groups, the strong group uses more social strategy and cognitive strategy, while the weak group uses more memory strategy than the other strategies. These results suggest that it is necessary to provide the students of different proficiency level with different types of materials.
Thirdly, we need a more systematic way of instructing the strategies to elementary English learners. Although teaching and learning models based on the strategies and materials in consideration with students’ levels are assumed to be successfully developed, the strategy training cannot be implemented if a teacher is lack of understanding strategies or fails to be accustomed with teaching the strategies. Therefore, teacher training not only for the understanding of the strategy itself, but also for how to teach the strategy should be regarded as a primary concern.